Karen González

Her Story Speaks

Karen González is seeking to see and love her neighbors as God does. She is a speaker, writer, public theologian, and immigrant advocate, who herself immigrated from Guatemala as a child. Karen is a former public school teacher and attended Fuller Theological Seminary, where she studied theology and missiology. For the last 15 years, she has been a non-profit professional, currently working for an organization that serves asylum seekers. She wrote a book about her own immigration story and the many immigrants found in the Bible: The God Who Sees: Immigrants, The Bible, and the Journey to Belong (2019). Her second book Beyond Welcome: Centering Immigrants in Our Christian Response to Immigration seeks to elevate the discourse in the church beyond just hospitality to immigrants. In our conversation we talk about her new book and why the traditional approach to immigration ministries and activism is at best incomplete and at worst harmful. Karen lives in the heart of Baltimore, Maryland, where she enjoys cooking Guatemalan food, traveling, watching baseball, studying the Mayan language Kaqchikel, and writing while her tabby cat Oscar naps beside her.